'Like Nero, ministers fiddled, and now it is our forests that will burn.” The charge – delivered in yesterday’s emergency debate in the House of Commons by shadow minister Mary Creagh – was gratuitously overblown: at present, it is only ash trees in nurseries and areas of new planting that are being destroyed if infected with Chalara fraxinea. But there is no doubt that the fungus, known as “ash dieback disease”, threatens to wreak havoc in Britain’s woodlands, endangering more than 80 million trees across the country.

In recent days, the Government has moved into crisis mode. The importation and movement of trees, seeds and saplings will be restricted, and the Forestry Commission and the Food and Environment Research Agency will divert much of their manpower to tracking the disease’s spread. At the moment, it appears that the threat is twofold: first, infected plants arriving from overseas have caused small but potentially manageable outbreaks around the country. Second, spores blown across the Channel appear to have infected mature trees in Kent and East Anglia. If the disease there can be exterminated, or somehow contained, we may avoid similar devastation to that witnessed in Denmark, which has lost almost all its ash trees. But that is a very big if indeed.

Whatever happens, the crisis has hardly painted the Government in the best light. Owen Paterson, the new Environment Secretary, has acted decisively this week – but why was swifter action not taken once the disease was detected? Labour, too, hardly comes out well. Mrs Creagh’s contribution yesterday was a machinegun fusillade of accusations of ministerial incompetence – yet the Horticultural Trades Association asked the then government to ban imports on ash saplings, the likeliest source of infection, as far back as 2009. Nor did filling the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs with a succession of apathetic urbanites do much to bolster Labour’s credentials as the party of the great outdoors.

Even though the crisis is in its early stages, some are already trying to blame it on the Coalition’s austerity programme, with instant demands that the Forestry Commission’s budget be protected. Yet while – as ministers acknowledged yesterday – plant health has traditionally had a far lower priority than animal, the problem is not so much money as attitude. Whitehall, as David Cameron has lamented, is beset by dither and delay – and Defra is one of the leading culprits (witness the endless consultations and administrative delays that afflicted the planned badger cull). For the sake of Britain’s forests, let us hope the authorities can learn their lessons fast.